Alive In The Merciful Country, by AL Kennedy review: 'ingeniously askew'

A novel in which an unspeakable character does awful things to awful people, Alive In The Merciful Country asks important questions about the nature of justice and mercy, writes Stuart Kelly

AL Kennedy | Contributed

In her last collection of short stories, We Are Attempting To Survive Our Time, AL Kennedy wrote, “Death’s a part of everybody’s mechanism, inside and ticking away. That’s why there’s got to be a lot of kindness”. That book was published in 2020, and it had a strangely palsied feel to it – short tempers, panic attacks, discrete but isolated lighted windows shining out in defiance of encroaching darkness, the ominous thought that “it will be terrible, this surviving”. It was, in fact, retrospectively prophetic about the pandemic. This novel is set in part in 2020, and deals inevitably with the pandemic; but the disease itself has almost metastasised into a deeper metaphor for a cankered society: there is something rotten in the state.

It is not the first time Kennedy has tacked close to the contemporary – Serious Sweet had a scene about non-violent protest at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, which took place just three years before publication, and ideas of resistance, performance and repression are even more pronounced in this work. That said, the thrawn refusal to despair and the necessity of kindness are features in all of Kennedy’s work, right up to the Doctor Who novel The Drosten’s Curse and the modern fable, The Little Snake.

The opening sets the tenor: “A person becomes what they need to be so that they can meet their time”. The person with this theory is Anna McCormick, a primary teacher at a fee-paying school in London, who has a teenage son, Paul, and a significant other whom we meet first as “F.L.” but whose name is revealed in due course, and who is currently lockdown sequestered on Colonsay. This is almost a reversal of the tradition dynamic where the author earns the reader’s trust: now the reader has to earn the character’s. The narrative’s momentum comes in the form of an unstamped package delivered to Anna, containing a manuscript of what might be a confession, apology or justification. It is the work of “Buster” – not his real name – who was once part of an agitprop clown troupe called the UnRule OrKestrA, “Purveyors of Fresh Nonsense and Funmongers, Strollers and Wise Fools”, with Anna, when she was the Amazing Annanka Ladystrong and he was Baron Samedi.

The opening page describes a scientific experiment with near-drowning mice (such similes are another Kennedy speciality), where it seems as if Anna plans to test the thesis that “somewhere in their tiny mouse brains they trusted that when they were desperate they’d be saved, and this let them endure. I am unable to say if this was good news”. The narrative parameters of faith and resilience are therefore established. Why – there is not question of if – did the double agent Buster betray them? Why did Anna run away to the circus, and who is the father of Paul? What are the mobilising griefs and grievances? And most importantly, who survives? Since this is a “found document”, the first person present tense is not a guarantee the writer is still among the breathing.

The plot is not so much a tightrope as a clothesline on which various polemics, cadenzas, ruminations and “routines” can be hung. This resembles the manner of Ali Smith’s equally à la mode Seasonal Quartet, and the extent to which you appreciate the schtick determines your response. There are echoes of previous books: one scene is set in the unlikeliness of Sark, which featured in The Blue Book and there is a family resemblance between Anna and Mary Margaret in Looking for the Possible Dance (both Kennedy’s exorcisms of Jean Brodie). Cyrano in So I Am Glad was another martyred jester.

Even though there are elements of the carnivalesque, Kennedy is very far from those who mistakenly imitate Carter and misread Bakhtin. There is a sensitivity to pointlessness, as something both futile and glorious: “we weren’t doing any harm” is a motto of honour. Anna may refer to the legions of “Stiltskins” but it is not cutesy or fey. In part, this is achieved by Buster’s voice in counterpoint. Here, Kennedy conveys a truly malign and amoral personality, a venomous chameleon. Linguistically, it is ingeniously askew. At one protest he reminisces “you perhapsly understood Gleneagles to be a music box of large dimensions with parts that were outrage in oppositional orientation and also outside broadcast lenses and also passion and riot shields and love were all there and intended to play one tune which is always the same tune”. The combination of error and techno-speak, malfunction and precision is chilling. The unspeakable character does awful things to awful people (and utterly not awful people) and the reader is confronted with a dilemma: do we cheer on extrajudicial vengeance? Again, the novel pre-empts this at the very beginning by asking if mercy is reserved for the unlucky.

Quite some time ago, the novelist Candia McWilliam, reviewing Everything You Need, noted Kennedy’s love of the word “tender”. In its double meaning – both pain and careful softness – seems to be the engine that drives her work. Vulnerability, in its sense of able to be wounded, is a prime virtue, in that its opposite can never be good. That is the paradox at the heart of her novels.

Alive In The Merciful Country, by AL Kennedy, Saraband, £18.99